Testicles are a national symbol, a trademark of the race; other peoples have luck, tradition, erudition, history, reason-but we alone have balls. (Danilo Kis quoted in Bracewell 2000: p.57
It is a widely shared assumption that since the end of the Cold war, conflicts and wars are less driven by political-ideological systems. Also they are not much caused by economic motives or even the classical ones of territory and power as an aim in themselves. The roots of conflicts are increasingly related to culture and identity, be it the wide-spread labeling of conflicts as 'ethnic' or the macrointerpretation of global politics in terms of a 'clash of civilisations'. 1 To Samuel Huntington, civilisations are ultimately defined to a large extent by religions. 2 Furthermore, he argues, one of the trends of the post-Cold War period is a 'revitalisation of religion throughout much of the world' which reinforces cultural difference. 3 Since the 1970s, the hope and fear of a 'withering away of religion' started to be defied. Not because of a lack of modernisation, but because one of the unexpected side-effects of modernisation was a 'revenge of God', an 'unsecularization of the world'. 4 In the area of international security, this has most keenly been felt in the form of an alleged threat from 'fundamentalism'. 5 This has meant primarily Islamic fundamentalism, 6 but the increasing influence of evangelic fundamentalism on US For helpful criticism and suggestions, we would like to thank
Walter Benjamin has famously pointed out that we are living in a society in which the exception has become a norm. Giorgio Agamben adds to this claim another one, that the spatial ordering principle for this new order is the camp. This article focuses on this diagnosis. We do not, however, discuss its validity but rather unpack what is meant when the concept of camp is used. The camp is, we argue, given by three structuring principles that might contradict and overlap in various ways: a disciplinary dispositif according to which a distinction between inside and outside is established; a logic of transgression according to which the inside-outside distinction is deliberately blurred; and finally a biopolitical rationale according to which the distinction between inside and outside is re-established on each side so that the included are included as excluded (as bodies to be governed) and the excluded are excluded as included (within the realm of power). Finally, we claim that it is the combination of these three principles -discipline, transgression and biopolitics -that leads to a society in which the exception has become the norm. Such 'society' is, we show, given by a strange and paradoxical overlapping of bonding and un-bonding, of distinction and indistinction.
This article focuses on party tourism as a kind of hedonism enjoyed on a massive scale in which the citizen is transformed into a ‘party animal’, a reduction which is experienced as a liberation from the daily routine of the ‘city’ or civilization, and in which the pursuit of unlimited enjoyment creates an exceptional zone where the body as an object of desire and as abject become indistinguishable. In this process, sociality tends to be reformed in the image of a ‘mass’ rather than ‘society’ and transgression/enjoyment paradoxically becomes the law. The article elaborates on this paradoxical notion of ‘forced enjoyment’ by reading Kant and Sade together: Sade (re)formulates Kant’s categorical imperative by universalizing transgression while, on the other hand, Kant illuminates Sade by stressing that the universal maxim and the particular tendencies always conflict.
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